I take further comfort in the fact that the human species managed to produce
pretty decent creative work during the 5,000 years that preceded 1710,
when the Statute of Anne, the world's first modern copyright law, passed
the British parliament. Sophocles, Dante, da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo,
Shakespeare, Newton, Cervantes, Bach - all found reasons to get out of
bed in the morning without expecting to own the works they created.

Even during the heyday of copyright, we got some pretty useful stuff out
of Benoit Mandelbrot, Vint Cerf,
Tim Berners-Lee, Marc Andreessen, and Linus Torvalds, none of whom did
their world-morphing work with royalties in mind. And then there are all
those great musicians
of the last 50 years who went on making music even after they discovered
that the record companies got to keep all the money.

Nor can I resist trotting out, one last time, the horse I rode back in
1994, when I explored these issues in a Wired essay called
"The Economy of Ideas."
(See Wired 2.03, page 84.) The
Grateful Dead, for whom I once wrote songs, learned by accident that if
we let fans tape concerts and freely reproduce those tapes - "stealing"
our intellectual "property" just like those heinous Napsterians - the tapes
would become
a marketing virus that would spawn enough Deadheads to fill any stadium
in America. Even though Deadheads had free recordings that often were more
entertaining than the band's commercial albums, fans still went out and
bought records in such quantity that most of them went platinum.

My opponents always dismiss this example as a special case. But it's not.
Here are a couple of others closer to Hollywood. Jack Valenti, head of
the MPAA and leader of the fight against DeCSS, fought to keep VCRs out
of America for half a dozen years, convinced they would kill the film industry.
Eventually that wall came down. What followed reversed his expectations
(not that he seems to have learned from the experience). Despite the ubiquity
of VCRs, more people go to the movies than ever, and videocassette rentals
and sales account for more than half of Hollywood's revenues.

For ideas, fame is fortune. And nothing makes you famous faster than an audience willing to distribute your work for free.

The RIAA is unalterably convinced that the easy availability of freely
downloadable commercial songs will bring on the apocalypse, and yet, during
the two years since MP3 music began flooding the Net, CD sales have
risen by 20 percent.

Finally, after giving up on copy protection, the software industry expected
that widespread piracy would surely occur. And it did. Even so, the software
industry is booming. Why? Because the more a program is pirated, the more
likely it is to become a standard.

All these examples point to the same conclusion: Noncommercial distribution
of information increases the sale
of commercial information. Abundance breeds abundance.

This is precisely contrary to what happens in a physical economy. When
you're selling nouns, there is an undeniable relationship between scarcity
and value. But in an economy of verbs, the inverse applies. There is a
relationship between familiarity and value. For ideas, fame is
fortune. And nothing makes you famous faster than an audience
willing to distribute your work for free.

All the same, there remains a general and passionate belief that, in the
absence of copyright law, artists and
other creative people will no longer be compensated. I'm forever accused
of being an antimaterialistic hippie who thinks we should all create for
the Greater Good of Mankind and lead lives of ascetic service. If only
I were so noble. While I do believe that most genuine artists are motivated
primarily by the joys of creation, I also believe we will be more productive
if we don't have to work a second job
to support our art habit. Think of how many more poems Wallace Stevens
could have written if he hadn't been obliged to run an insurance company
to support his "hobby."

Following the death of copyright, I believe our interests will be assured
by the following practical values: relationship, convenience, interactivity,
service, and ethics.

Before I explain further, let me state a creed: Art is a service, not a
product. Created beauty is a relationship, and
a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work
to "content" is like praying in swear words. End of sermon. Back to business.

The economic model that supported most of the ancient masters was patronage,
whether endowed by a wealthy individual, a religious institution, a university,
a corporation, or - through the instrument of governmental support - by
society as a whole.

Patronage is both a relationship and a service. It is a relationship that
supported genius during the Renaissance and supports it today. Da Vinci,
Michelangelo, and Botticelli all shared the support of both the Medicis
and, through Pope Leo X, the Catholic church. Bach had a series of patrons,
most notably the Duke of Weimar. I could go on, but I can already hear
you saying, "Surely this fool doesn't expect the return of patronage."

In fact, patronage never went away. It just changed its appearance. Marc
Andreessen was a beneficiary of the "patronage" of the National Center
for Supercomputer Applications when he created Mosaic; CERN was a patron
to Tim Berners-Lee when he created the World Wide
Web. Darpa was Vint Cerf's benefactor; IBM was Benoit Mandelbrot's.

"Aha!" you say, "but IBM is a corporation. It profited
from the intellectual property Mandelbrot created." Maybe, but so did the
rest of us. While IBM would patent air and water if it could, I don't
believe it ever attempted to patent fractal geometry.

Relationship, along with service, is at the heart of what supports all
sorts of other modern, though more anonymous, "knowledge workers." Doctors
are economically protected by a relationship with their patients, architects
with their clients, executives with their stockholders. In general, if
you substitute "relationship" for "property," you begin to understand why
a digitized information economy can work fine in the absence of enforceable
property law. Cyberspace is unreal estate. Relationships
are its geology.

Convenience is another important factor in the future compensation of creation.
The reason video didn't kill the movie star is that it's simply more convenient
to rent a video than to copy one. Software is easy to copy, of course,
but software piracy hasn't impoverished Bill Gates. Why? Because in the
long run it's more convenient to enter into
a relationship with Microsoft if you hope to use its products in an ongoing
way. It's certainly easier to get technical support if you have a real
serial number when you call. And that serial number is not a thing. It's
a contract. It is the symbol of a relationship.